submitted to Buzzflash:
by Cindy Sheehan
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Blog
Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox
Sept. 15, 2009
I was just watching a report on CNN and after the commentator said that support for Afghanistan is rapidly dwindling (58 percent now think it’s not worth fighting), an interview with Obama was shown.
The interviewer asked the president if he was afraid that because war-weary America is growing impatient with the wars, that failing to withdraw and, in fact, sending more troops would look like what Johnson did in Vietnam, and therefore make Obama a “One term president.”
Well, I have been saying that whoever won in 2008 would not do the right thing and would send the USA even farther down the path to ruin (because every president has to follow orders from his masters, the corporations) and be a one term president.
But, Obama incredibly answered the interviewer with: “You have to learn lessons from history.” Somehow, Obama believes, he’s going to stain his hands darker with blood, but he’s not going to pay any political consequences.
That Obama is talking about “history” in relation to trying to subdue Afghanistan is fraught with irony. First of all, the Afghanistan that was invaded in 2001 has very little resemblance to the Afghanistan of today. Many analysts say that our rationale for being there: al Qaeda has long ago moved on. What about the history that Jimmy Carter’s administration was responsible for arming, training and otherwise supporting (and creating) al Qaeda in the first place and that Jimmy Carter signed an order supporting the Mujahadeen against the USSR in 1979 which spurred the Soviet Union’s invasion that resulted in a decade long bloody war that defeated the USSR’s military empire.
Let’s go back to Genghis Kahn and Alexander the Great and Great Britain…no empire has ever been “successful” in Afghanistan and it really makes me wonder what “history” Barack Obama is learning from. Not the “history” where Afghanistan has been the burial place for empire, that’s for sure.
Obviously, obviously our “leaders” are out of control and there is no mass movement of Americans who will be able to get out in the streets to stop the homicidal maniacs.
We need to stop allowing ourselves to be used as weapons of mass destruction against each other and that is by refusing to join the Army of the Empire or by refusing to be deployed to the messes in the Middle East.
All of this excess of the War Machine is getting fundamentally ridiculous. The cannon fodder of the US military should refuse to be used as these pawns for idiotic and ignorant Commanders in Chief. Why die or kill innocent Afghans for the arrogance of Emperors?
Bloody hands are bloody hands. Our president, love him or hate him, is a reflection of us, so as long as we quietly sit by and allow him to murder in our names, our hands get bloodier, too!
I will be one that stands up and is counted against Obama and his policies as adamantly as I was against Bush and his—because they are the same and they are wrong.
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Yes, indeed, ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’. There may be some parallels in a comparison of Afghanistan with Vietnam but for the most part the war in Afghanistan is vastly different. It may have been possible to just pull out of Vietnam without dire consequence. That is not the case with Afghanistan. In Vietnam the enemy we battled did represent an alternative civilization, complete with cultural and governmental institutions. The US may not have agreed with the philosophy of that alternative civilization but it did exist. Such is not the case with Afghanistan. The Karzai ‘government’ is really nothing more than a US installed oilman who has no true interest in governing or creating a modern Afghani culture. If we just left chaos would ensue. On the other hand when we did leave Vietnam a group committed to building a modern Vietnam was in place. Again, we may not have agreed with their philosophy but it wasn’t a chaotic mass of violent factions at war with each other for supremacy and the right to govern. Nor, for all the nonsensical yammering about dominoes in the region, did a monolithic communist bloc rise up to threaten the world. But in the region of Afghanistan the possibility of an anti US group with the ability to seize the Pakistan nuclear arsenal does present a real threat to the Western world. Another difference between Vietnam and Afghanistan is that the Vietnamese were fighting to throw off colonial rule and establish a unified Vietnam; a republic. This was the goal of Ho Chi Minh since the 1920’s; an independent Vietnam. The Afghans are not fighting for their independence per se; they are fighting invaders. There is no faction fighting for a free and independent Afghanistan. There is only a will to defeat the invaders. It is not the same thing. If you go back to the origins of our active involvement in Afghanistan you will realize that the worst possible outcome for the Bush administration would’ve been to actually capture Osama bin Laden. After all, without Osama at large how could the invasion of Iraq ever come about? You may correctly say that the Obama administration is becoming a tool of the Military/Industrial/National Security State complex. You must realize however that the Bush administration WAS Military/Industrial/National Security State complex.
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As Pete Townsend said in “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” -“meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” I thought maybe Obama would do the right thing and pull us out of the unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but so far, no word on that. There’s too much money to be made by fatcat corporations (Halliburton) at the expense of thousands of innocent lives and America’s fighting men and women. As long as the almighty buck is worshiped as the United States’s Supreme God, we are condemed to repeat our mistakes over and over again. The corporations have buckets of American blood on their hands and it will never wash off, no matter how hard they try.